Considering working remotely?

You should probably be working remotely.

Seriously. Take a quick look around you right now. Do you appear to be sitting in a felt cube? Does the word "software" appear in your job description? Cool. You're in a position to make your life a whole lot better.

I've been working 100% remotely for the better part of ten years now. The short answer for why? Because I can.

That's really the single greatest feature of being a developer today. You can do your thing from pretty much anywhere in the world with no reduction in throughput.

I can (and have) set up shop for the winter on some remote Central American surf break. I can (and have) moved my main residence to a small village in the French countryside where the quality of life is good and there's enough bouldering to last me a lifetime of afternoons off. I can (and have) simply packed my whole development world onto a 12" Thinkpad and headed off on the road for an entire year.

And all those places have wifi. And I can work there. So I do.

So even if I found a company that did happen to have an office right next to that perfect left reef pass off the coast of Sumatra, I probably still wouldn't want to commit myself to working there full time. I already have an office there. As well as everywhere else I'd like to be.

It didn't used to be like this. And it still isn't for most professions. But it absolutely is for software. As a developer, I think you'd be crazy to pass up on it.

So yeah, that's why.

And here's the thing, in case you missed it above. You can do this too. The industry is waking up to the fact that remote working works. There are tons of companies hiring remote workers right now. Enough so that it doesn't even make sense for me to list any of them here.

So yeah, get on it today. Find a way out of that cubicle, and at the very least onto your kitchen table. You can sort out the whole laptop & beach thing later. But the first step is to acknowledge that we're living in the future, and start doing so.

Good luck!


Jason Kester
@jasonkester

I run a little company called Expat Software. Right now, the most interesting things we're doing are related to Cloud Storage Analytics, Online Classrooms, and Customer Lifecycle Metrics for SaaS Businesses. I'll leave it to you to figure out how those things tie together.


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